Patti Smith’s 40 Favorite Books

in Books, Music | April 2nd, 2018

Image of Pat­ti Smith per­form­ing in Rio de Janeiro by Dai­go Oli­va

As a lit­tle girl, Pat­ti Smith found lib­er­a­tion in words — first through the bed­time prayers she made up her­self, and lat­er in books. “I was com­plete­ly smit­ten by the book,” she writes in her mem­oir, Just Kids.  “I longed to read them all, and the things I read of pro­duced new yearn­ings.”

Smith found a role mod­el in Jo, the tomboy writer in Louisa May Alcot­t’s Lit­tle Women. “She gave me the courage of a new goal,” writes Smith, “and soon I was craft­ing lit­tle sto­ries and spin­ning long yarns for my broth­er and sis­ter.” As a teenag­er she dis­cov­ered the French Sym­bol­ist poets Charles Baude­laire and espe­cial­ly Arthur Rim­baud, who inspired her and helped shape her own artis­tic per­sona as a poet and punk rock­er.

Despite her fame as a rock ’n’ roll musi­cian, Smith has always described her­self as essen­tial­ly a book­ish per­son. It was around the time of Smith’s appear­ance at the 2008 Mel­bourne Inter­na­tion­al Arts Fes­ti­val, accord­ing to Ver­ti­go, that Smith released this list of her favorite books. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, it’s an eclec­tic and fas­ci­nat­ing group of books:

Smith’s read­ing rec­om­men­da­tions have no doubt evolved since the list was giv­en. Ear­li­er this year a writer for Elle asked what books she would sug­gest. “I could rec­om­mend a mil­lion,” Smith respond­ed. “I would just say read any­thing by [Rober­to] Bolaño. Re-read all the great clas­sics. Read The Scar­let Let­ter, read Moby Dick, read [Haru­ki] Muraka­mi. But Rober­to Bolaño’s 2666 is the first mas­ter­piece of the 21st cen­tu­ry.”

You can find a num­ber of the texts list­ed above in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in April 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Hayao Miyaza­ki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers

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How Bill Gates Reads Books

in Books | April 2nd, 2018

If you’re a ded­i­cat­ed read­er of our site, you know that we’ve peri­od­i­cal­ly high­light­ed Bill Gates’ favorite books. (See his lists from 2015, 2016 and 2017, plus this rec­om­men­da­tion made ear­li­er this year.) You also know that his read­ing diet skews heav­i­ly towards non-fiction–towards books like Enlight­en­ment Now by Steven Pinker, Sapi­ens: A Brief His­to­ry of Humankind by Noah Yuval Harari, and Mind­set: The New Psy­chol­o­gy of Suc­cess by Car­ol S. Dweck.

That’s what Gates likes to read. But how about how he reads? How does Gates get the most out of his time spent read­ing? As he explains in the Quartz video above, it boils down to this:

  1. Take Notes in the Mar­gins: That sim­ple step helps ensure that you’re real­ly pay­ing atten­tion and engag­ing crit­i­cal­ly with the text. It lets you “take in new knowl­edge and attach it to knowl­edge you already have.”
  2. Don’t Start What You Can’t Fin­ish: Gates does­n’t explain why you should nev­er cut your loss­es. Maybe it’s a form of self-dis­ci­pline. Maybe it’s a fear of miss­ing out on what a book promis­es to deliv­er. Or maybe it’s the sunk cost fal­la­cy. Either way, Gates does rec­om­mend pick­ing your books care­ful­ly before you get start­ed.
  3. Paper Books, Not eBooks: Bet­ter for mar­gin­a­lia, for sure.
  4. Block Out an Hour of Read­ing Time: You can’t read a seri­ous book in a short sit­ting. To real­ly engage with a book, give it a good hour each day. A tall order, I known, in our age of ever-declin­ing atten­tion spans.

To be sure, you have your own read­ing prac­tices to rec­om­mend. Please don’t hes­i­tate to add them to the com­ments sec­tion below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Gates, Book Crit­ic, Names His Top 5 Books of 2015

Six Books (and One Blog) Bill Gates Wants You to Read This Sum­mer

Take Big His­to­ry: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry, Fund­ed by Bill Gates

View Bill Gates’ Mobile Library: The Books & Cours­es That Help Him Change The World

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The 1,700+ Words Invented by Shakespeare*

in English Language, Literature, Theatre | April 2nd, 2018

One of the favorite ref­er­ence books on my shelves isn’t a style guide or dic­tio­nary but a col­lec­tion of insults. And not just any col­lec­tion of insults, but Shakespeare’s Insults for Teach­ers, an illus­trat­ed guide through the playwright’s barbs and put-downs, designed to offer com­ic relief to the belea­guered edu­ca­tor. (Books and web­sites about Shakespeare’s insults almost con­sti­tute a genre in them­selves.) I refer to this slim, humor­ous hard­back every time dis­cus­sions of Shake­speare get too pon­der­ous, to remind myself at a glance that what read­ers and audi­ences have always val­ued in his work is its light­ning-fast wit and inven­tive­ness.

While perus­ing any curat­ed selec­tion of Shakespeare’s insults, one can’t help but notice that, amidst the puns and bawdy ref­er­ences to body parts, so many of his wise­cracks are about lan­guage itself—about cer­tain char­ac­ters’ lack of clar­i­ty or odd ways of speak­ing. From Much Ado About Noth­ing there’s the col­or­ful, “His words are a very fan­tas­ti­cal ban­quet, just so many strange dish­es.” From The Mer­chant of Venice, the sar­cas­tic, “Good­ly Lord, what a wit-snap­per you are!” From Troilus and Cres­si­da, the deri­sive, “There’s a stewed phrase indeed!” And from Ham­let the sub­tle shade of “This is the very coinage of your brain.”

Indeed, it can often seem that Shakespeare—if we grant his his­toric­i­ty and authorship—is often writ­ing self-dep­re­cat­ing notes about him­self. “It is often said,” writes Fras­er McAlpine at BBC Amer­i­ca, that Shake­speare “invent­ed a lot of what we cur­rent­ly call the Eng­lish lan­guage…. Some­thing like 1700 [words], all told,” which would mean that “out of every ten words,” in his plays, “one will either have been new to his audi­ence, new to his actors, or will have been pass­ing­ly famil­iar, but nev­er writ­ten down before.” It’s no won­der so much of his dia­logue seems to car­ry on a meta-com­men­tary about the strange­ness of its lan­guage.

We have enough trou­ble under­stand­ing Shake­speare today. The ques­tion McAlpine asks is how his con­tem­po­rary audi­ences could under­stand him, giv­en that so much of his dic­tion was “the very coinage” of his brain. Lists of words first used by Shake­speare can be found aplent­ly. There’s this cat­a­log from the exhaus­tive mul­ti-vol­ume lit­er­ary ref­er­ence The Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, which lists such now-every­day words as “acces­si­ble,” “accom­mo­da­tion,” and “addic­tion” as mak­ing their first appear­ance in the plays. These “were not all invent­ed by Shake­speare,” the list dis­claims, “but the ear­li­est cita­tions for them in the OED” are from his work, mean­ing that the dictionary’s edi­tors could find no ear­li­er appear­ance in his­tor­i­cal writ­ten sources in Eng­lish.

Anoth­er short­er list links to an excerpt from Charles and Mary Cow­den Clarke’s The Shake­speare Key, show­ing how the author, “with the right and might of a true poet… mint­ed sev­er­al words” that are now cur­rent, or “deserve” to be, such as the verb “artic­u­late,” which we do use, and the noun “co-mart”—meaning “joint bargains”—which we could and maybe should. At ELLO, or Eng­lish Lan­guage and Lin­guis­tics Online, we find a short tuto­r­i­al on how Shake­speare formed new words, by bor­row­ing them from oth­er lan­guages, or adapt­ing them from oth­er parts of speech, turn­ing verbs into nouns, for exam­ple, or vice ver­sa, and adding new end­ings to exist­ing words.

“Whether you are ‘fash­ion­able’ or ‘sanc­ti­mo­nious,’” writes Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, “thank Shake­speare, who like­ly coined the terms.” He also appar­ent­ly invent­ed sev­er­al phras­es we now use in com­mon speech, like “full cir­cle,” “one fell swoop,” “strange bed­fel­lows,” and “method in the mad­ness.” (In anoth­er BBC Amer­i­ca arti­cle, McAlpine lists 45 such phras­es.) The online sources for Shakespeare’s orig­i­nal vocab­u­lary are mul­ti­tude, but we should note that many of them do not meet schol­ar­ly stan­dards. As lin­guists and Shake­speare experts David and Ben Crys­tal write in Shakespeare’s Words, “we found very lit­tle that might be classed as ‘high-qual­i­ty Shake­speare­an lex­i­cog­ra­phy’” online.

So, there are rea­sons to be skep­ti­cal about claims that Shake­speare is respon­si­ble for the 1700 or more words for which he’s giv­en sole cred­it. (Hence the aster­isk in our title.) As not­ed, a great many of those words already exist­ed in dif­fer­ent forms, and many of them may have exist­ed as non-lit­er­ary col­lo­qui­alisms before he raised their pro­file to the Eliz­a­bethan stage. Nonethe­less, it is cer­tain­ly the case that the Bard coined or first used hun­dreds of words, writes McAlpine, “with no obvi­ous prece­dent to the lis­ten­er, unless you were schooled in Latin or Greek.” The ques­tion, then, remains: “what on Earth did Shakespeare’s [most­ly] une­d­u­cat­ed audi­ence make of this influx of new­ly-mint­ed lan­guage into their enter­tain­ment?”

McAlpine brings those poten­tial­ly stu­pe­fied Eliz­a­bethans into the present by com­par­ing watch­ing a Shake­speare play to watch­ing “a three-hour long, open air rap bat­tle. One in which you have no idea what any of the slang means.” A good deal would go over your head, “you’d maybe get the gist, but not the full impact,” but all the same, “it would all seem ter­ri­bly impor­tant and dra­mat­ic.” (Cos­tum­ing, props, and stag­ing, of course, helped a lot, and still do.) The anal­o­gy works not only because of the amount of slang deployed in the plays, but also because of the inten­si­ty and reg­u­lar­i­ty of the boasts and put-downs, which makes even more inter­est­ing one data scientist’s attempt to com­pare Shakespeare’s vocab­u­lary with that of mod­ern rap­pers, whose lan­guage is, just as often, the very coinage of their brains.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Do Rap­pers Have a Big­ger Vocab­u­lary Than Shake­speare?: A Data Sci­en­tist Maps Out the Answer

Hear 55 Hours of Shakespeare’s Plays: The Tragedies, Come­dies & His­to­ries Per­formed by Vanes­sa Red­grave, Sir John Giel­gud, Ralph Fiennes & Many More

What Shakespeare’s Eng­lish Sound­ed Like, and How We Know It

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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Applause Fills the Air as Stephen Hawking Gets Laid to Rest in Cambridge, England

in Life, Physics | March 31st, 2018

Ear­li­er today, they laid Stephen Hawk­ing to rest in a pri­vate funer­al held at Uni­ver­si­ty Church of St. Mary the Great in Cam­bridge, Eng­land. Although the funer­al itself was attend­ed by only 500 guests, the streets of Cam­bridge swelled with onlook­ers who broke into applause as the cof­fin hold­ing the physi­cist made its way into the church, leav­ing us with some proof that there’s still some­thing right in a world tilt­ing toward the wrong, that we can still appre­ci­ate some­one who over­came so much, and left us with even more.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawk­ing Picks the Music (and One Nov­el) He’d Spend Eter­ni­ty With: Stream the Playlist Online

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion
Stephen Hawking’s Lec­tures on Black Holes Now Ful­ly Ani­mat­ed with Chalk­board Illus­tra­tions

Watch Stephen Hawking’s Inter­view with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Record­ed 10 Days Before His Death: A Last Con­ver­sa­tion about Black Holes, Time Trav­el & More

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Hear Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight Read in Their Original Old and Middle English by an MIT Medievalist

in English Language, Literature | March 30th, 2018

Many a mock­ing cri­tique floats around point­ing out that some peo­ple who tell their mul­ti­lin­gual neigh­bors to “speak Eng­lish” seem to have a lot of trou­ble with the lan­guage them­selves. I must con­fess, I find the obser­va­tion more sad than fun­ny. I’ve met many Eng­lish speak­ers who strug­gle with under­stand­ing the pecu­liar­i­ties of the lan­guage and do not know its his­to­ry. Increas­ing­ly, such things are not taught to those who don’t devote them­selves to lan­guage study.

When peo­ple do learn how the lan­guage evolved, they can be shocked that for much of its his­to­ry, Eng­lish was unrec­og­niz­able to mod­ern ears. Indeed, the study of Old Eng­lish—or Anglo-Sax­on, the lan­guage of Beowulf—sat­is­fies for­eign lan­guage require­ments in many Eng­lish depart­ments. Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in runic before it incor­po­rat­ed the Latin alpha­bet (and retain­ing some of those ear­ly sym­bols after­ward), this Ger­man­ic lan­guage slow­ly became more Lati­nate, and gave way among the read­ing class­es in Britain to Anglo-Nor­man, a Ger­man­ic-French cousin, for a few cen­turies after 1066.

That’s the very short ver­sion. These strains and more even­tu­al­ly com­min­gled to form Mid­dle Eng­lish, the lan­guage of Chaucer, which also sounds to mod­ern ears like anoth­er tongue, though we rec­og­nize more of it. In the video above, Medieval­ist and MIT pro­fes­sor Arthur Bahr gives us demon­stra­tions of both Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish in read­ings of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as part of his 2014 course, “Major Authors: Old Eng­lish and Beowulf.” (You can still vis­it the course site, read the syl­labus and down­load course mate­ri­als.)

Bahr reads the first 20 lines of the ancient epic poem, which begins:

Hwæt. We Gar­de­na in geardagum, 
þeod­cyninga, þrym gefrunon, 
hu ða æþelin­gas ellen freme­don. 

“Besides being the lan­guage of Rohan in the nov­els of Tolkien,” he writes, “Old Eng­lish is a lan­guage of long, cold, and lone­ly win­ters; of haunt­ing beau­ty found in unex­pect­ed places; and of unshak­able resolve in the face of insur­mount­able odds.” For all its dis­tance from us, we can still rec­og­nize quite a lot in Old Eng­lish if we lis­ten close­ly. Much of its vocab­u­lary and inflec­tions sur­vive, unchanged but for pro­nun­ci­a­tion and spelling, in mod­ern Eng­lish, includ­ing many of the language’s most basic words, like “the,” “in” and “are,” and most com­mon, like “god,” “name,” “me,” “hand,” and even “old.”

After the Viking and Nor­man inva­sions, Old Eng­lish became “the third lan­guage in its own coun­try,” notes Luke Mastin at his His­to­ry of Eng­lish site. More spo­ken than writ­ten, it “effec­tive­ly sank to the lev­el of a patois or cre­ole,” with sev­er­al dis­tinct region­al vari­ants. Eng­lish seemed at one time “in dire per­il” of dying out but “showed its resilience once again, and, two hun­dred years after the Nor­man Con­quest, it was Eng­lish not French that emerged as the lan­guage of Eng­land,” though it remained a dif­fuse col­lec­tion of dialects. As you’ll hear in Bahr’s Mid­dle Eng­lish read­ing, it was also an Eng­lish entire­ly trans­formed by the lan­guages around it, as it would be once again a few hun­dred years lat­er, when we get to the Eng­lish of Shake­speare.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Beowulf Read In the Orig­i­nal Old Eng­lish: How Many Words Do You Rec­og­nize?

1,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of Beowulf Dig­i­tized and Now Online

Sea­mus Heaney Reads His Exquis­ite Trans­la­tion of Beowulf and His Mem­o­rable 1995 Nobel Lec­ture

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Shazam for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Identify Plants, Animals & Other Denizens of the Natural World

in Biology, K-12, Photography, Science, Technology | March 30th, 2018

Do you ever long for those not-so-long-ago days when you skipped through the world, breath­less with the antic­i­pa­tion of catch­ing Poké­mon on your phone screen?

If so, you might enjoy bag­ging some of the Pokeverse’s real world coun­ter­parts using Seek, iNaturalist’s new pho­to-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion app. It does for the nat­ur­al world what Shaz­am does for music.

Aim your phone’s cam­era at a non­de­script leaf or the grasshop­per-ish-look­ing crea­ture who’s camped on your porch light. With a bit of luck, Seek will pull up the rel­e­vant Wikipedia entry to help the two of you get bet­ter acquaint­ed.

Reg­is­tered users can pin their finds to their per­son­al col­lec­tions, pro­vid­ed the app’s recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­duces a match.

(Sev­er­al ear­ly adopters sug­gest it’s still a few house­plants shy of true func­tion­al­i­ty…)

Seek’s pro­tec­tive stance with regard to pri­va­cy set­tings is well suit­ed to junior spec­i­men col­lec­tors, as are the vir­tu­al badges with which it rewards ener­getic upload­ers.

While it doesn’t hang onto user data, Seek is build­ing a pho­to library, com­posed in part of user sub­mis­sions.

(Your cat is ready for her close up, Mr. DeMille…)

(Dit­to your Por­to­bel­lo Mush­room burg­er…)

Down­load Seek for free on iTunes or Google Play.

via Earth­er/My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Japanese Designer Creates Incredibly Detailed & Realistic Maps of a City That Doesn’t Exist

in Maps | March 30th, 2018

When he first spent time in Japan­ese cities, urban design and his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Bar­rie Shel­ton “was baf­fled, irri­tat­ed, and even intim­i­dat­ed by what I saw. Yet at the same time I found myself ener­gized, ani­mat­ed, and indeed inspired by them. The effect was lib­er­at­ing and my intu­ition was quick to sug­gest that fur­ther explo­ration of their chaot­ic vital­i­ty might be extreme­ly reward­ing.” That explo­ration involved vis­its to “alleys, shrine and tem­ple precincts, high­ways, rail­way sta­tions (and their ‘mag­net­ic’ fields), roof-tops, obser­va­tion decks, arcades, under­ground streets, bars, gar­dens,” and so on, and no less essen­tial­ly includ­ed “almost com­pul­sive por­ing over city maps (old and new).”

It all cul­mi­nat­ed in Shel­ton’s book Learn­ing from the Japan­ese City, a study that can help any West­ern­er bet­ter under­stand the likes of Tokyo, Osa­ka, Kyoto, Kanaza­wa, Hiroshi­ma, Fukuo­ka, or indeed Nago­mu­ru City. You won’t find that last, how­ev­er, on any map of Japan, nor will you find it in the coun­try itself. It exists in the land of Naira, which itself exists in the mind of Japan­ese graph­ic design­er and car­tog­ra­ph­er Imaizu­mi Takayu­ki. Imaizu­mi’s painstak­ing, ongo­ing work has pro­duced maps of Nago­mu­ru City that look at it in dif­fer­ent ways in dif­fer­ent eras, which you can browse on Let’s Go to the Imag­i­nary Cities! On this page you can explore scrol­lable maps of the city by first select­ing one of its thir­ty regions; just below that, you can also down­load a large PDF map of the entire metrop­o­lis.

Imaizu­mi’s urban car­to­graph­ic vision is so rich­ly real­ized that it has pro­duced art exhi­bi­tions, a book, and even a vari­ety of phys­i­cal arti­facts. On one page, for instance, you’ll find pho­tographs of the con­tents of sev­er­al imag­i­nary wal­lets lost on the imag­i­nary streets of Nago­mu­ru City by its imag­i­nary cit­i­zens. On anoth­er appear the imag­i­nary cash cards issued by the imag­i­nary Nago­mu­ru Bank, com­plete with a pair of imag­i­nary mas­cots with­out which, as any­one with any expe­ri­ence of Japan knows, no card would be com­plete. These arti­facts and oth­ers have all come as a result of the project Imaizu­mi began at just ten years old, a brief his­to­ry of which Japan­ese-read­ers can take in here.

“If I can imag­ine a fic­tive nation,” writes Roland Barthes in Empire of Signs, “I can give it an invent­ed name, treat it declar­a­tive­ly as a nov­el­is­tic object,” then “iso­late some­where in the world (far­away) a cer­tain num­ber of fea­tures (a term employed in lin­guis­tics), and out of all these fea­tures delib­er­ate­ly form a sys­tem. It is this sys­tem which I call: Japan.” Imaizu­mi chose to call his sys­tem Nago­mu­ru City, but one imag­ines that all its care­ful­ly cre­at­ed and posi­tioned fea­tures and details — the train lines and sta­tions, the shrines and tem­ples, the hous­ing devel­op­ments, the con­ve­nience stores, all the things cel­e­brat­ed in both Empire of Signs and Learn­ing from the Japan­ese City — would have fired up Barthes’ imag­i­na­tion just as much as did the real Japan.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Invis­i­ble Cities Illus­trat­ed: Artist Illus­trates Each and Every City in Ita­lo Calvino’s Clas­sic Nov­el

Invis­i­ble Cities Illus­trat­ed: Three Artists Paint Every City in Ita­lo Calvino’s Clas­sic Nov­el

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

Artist Re-Envi­sions Nation­al Parks in the Style of Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth Maps

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Fall’s Mark E. Smith’s (RIP) Creates a List of His Favorite Books, Films & Music, Circa 1981

in Music | March 29th, 2018

Some of us are still reel­ing from the death this last Jan­u­ary of Mark E. Smith, the front­man and acer­bic brains behind The Fall, sure­ly one of post-punk’s finest groups, and def­i­nite­ly its longest last­ing. The band might not have scored that many Top 40 sin­gles, but Britain’s music press loved and feared Smith in equal amounts. He was always good for a bel­liger­ent quote, or a beer-fueled inter­view down the pub. To para­phrase DJ John Peel, Smith was the yard­stick against which oth­er musi­cians were mea­sured.

And his death has also brought out a trea­sure trove of clip­pings, includ­ing this one from the August 15, 1981 edi­tion of NME. “Por­trait of the Artist as a Con­sumer” was an occa­sion­al series, ask­ing musi­cians for their favorite books, art, writ­ers, come­di­ans, films, and even oth­er music. We’ve past­ed the orig­i­nal scan above, but just in case, we’ve tran­scribed his lists with a lit­tle bit of com­men­tary.

READS
Gulcher — Richard Meltzer
A Small Town in Ger­many — John Le Car­ré
A Scan­ner Dark­ly — Philip K. Dick
The Sirens of Titan — Kurt Von­negut Jr.
The Deer Park - Nor­man Mail­er
The Black Room — Col­in Wil­son
Rit­u­al in the Dark — Col­in Wil­son
Cogan’s Trade — George V. Hig­gins
At the Moun­tains of Mad­ness - H.P. Love­craft
Beyond Good and Evil — Fred­erich Niet­zsche

AND
U.S. Civ­il War Hand­book — William H. Price
How I Cre­at­ed Mod­ern Music — D. McCul­loch (a week­ly ser­i­al)
True Crime Month­ly
Pri­vate Eye
Fibs About M.E. Smith by J. Cope (a pam­phlet)

Okay, for long­time fans of The Fall, the appear­ance of Philip K. Dick and H.P. Love­craft should come as no sur­prise, as Smith ref­er­enced them often in his lyrics. Gulcher (sub­ti­tled Post-Rock Cul­tur­al Plu­ral­ism in Amer­i­ca) was one of the first ever col­lec­tions of seri­ous rock crit­i­cism from one of the first ever rock crit­ics. The blurb on Col­in Wil­son over at Ama­zon says he “wrote wide­ly on true crime, mys­ti­cism and the para­nor­mal” which sounds pret­ty much like Smith’s CV. George V. Hig­gins was also a crime writer, with a gift for mafioso gab. And as for The Deer Park by Mail­er, Smith took the title for an ear­ly Fall song:

Of Smith’s fas­ci­na­tion with the U.S. Civ­il War, I can think of his own visu­al­iz­ing between the North and South in his own belea­guered Britain, and the lyric from “The N.W.R.A.”:

“The streets of Soho did rever­ber­ate
With drunk­en High­land men
Revenge for Cul­lo­den dead
The North had rose again
But it would turn out wrong”

Don’t go look­ing for the McCul­loch and Cope writings—they’re both jokes at the expense of fel­low Man­cu­ni­ans Ian McCul­loch (Echo and the Bun­ny­men) and Julian Cope, who Smith gigged with back in the day and went on to—as Smith no doubt saw it—sell out to the main­stream

[UPDATE: As one com­menter has not­ed D. Cul­loch is actu­al­ly Dave McCul­loch, Ian’s broth­er and once the edi­tor and writer for Sounds. How­ev­er, he is a man that has dropped off the face of the Inter­net, and we’ll need some more dig­ging to see if his ser­i­al even exists. Help us in the com­ments.]

 

WRITERS
Claude Bessy
Bur­roughs

Of William S. Bur­roughs much has been writ­ten, but Claude Bessy was a French writer who start­ed and/or wrote for sev­er­al punk fanzines, includ­ing Ange­leno Dread and Slash, was the res­i­dent VJ at Manchester’s Hacien­da Club, and directed—supposedly—music videos for The Fall (which ones, I can’t dis­cern).

ART
Wyn­d­ham Lewis
Mal­colm Alli­son
Vir­gin Prunes
The Worst live, March­ester Dec. ’77

Those who have seen Lewis’ writ­ings for BLAST, the mag­a­zine of the vor­ti­cist move­ment in Britain, cir­ca 1914, might be mis­tak­en that they were look­ing at a M.E.S. lyric sheet.

The list is Smith’s joke over what is con­sid­ered art: Mal­colm Alli­son was an Eng­lish foot­ball play­er and man­ag­er; the Vir­gin Prunes were an Irish post-punk band; The Worst was a lit­tle known punk band that shared the bill with The Fall and John Coop­er Clark at the Elec­tric Cir­cus gig—the record­ing of which was the Fall’s first release.

COMEDIANS
Lenny Bruce
Alan Pel­lay
Bernard Man­ning
All Ian Cur­tis deriv­a­tives

Lenny Bruce and Bernard Man­ning are oppo­site ends of a very odd spec­trum. More inter­est­ing is Alan Pel­lay aka Al Pel­lay aka Lana Pel­lay, who front­ed a group I Scream Plea­sures that often opened for The Fall, and whose angry dec­la­ra­tions over dub tracks by Adri­an Sher­wood are son­ic cousins to Smith.

FILMS
Polanski’s Mac­beth
Mel Brook’s (sic) High Anx­i­ety
Fellini’s Rome
The Man with X‑Ray Eyes and The Lost Week­end star­ring Ray Mil­land
Visconti’s The Damned
Days of Wine and Ros­es with Jack Lem­mon
Char­lie Bub­bles with Albert Finney

The most per­son­al selec­tion here is the last one, a 1968 film that starred Finney as a des­per­ate but suc­cess­ful writer who returns to his child­hood home…Salford, near Man­ches­ter, Smith’s own home­town.

TV
Bluey
John Cleese adverts

Of the two, Bluey is the rare one, a cult Aus­tralian cop dra­ma from 1976 cre­at­ed by Jock Blair and Ian Jones. We also have no idea why he liked it.

MUSIC

Take No Pris­on­ers — Lou Reed
Peter Ham­mill
John­ny Cash
The Pan­ther Burns
God Save the Queen — The Sex Pis­tols
Raw and Alive — The Seeds
Peb­bles Vol. 3 — Var­i­ous
16 Great­est Truck Dri­ver Hits cas­sette
Radio City — Philip John­son (cas­sette)
Der Plan
Alter­na­tive TV
Land of the Homo Jews and Hank Williams Was Queer, live — Fear (L.A. Group)
We’re Only In It for the Mon­ey — Moth­ers of Inven­tion

So, at last, the music list. No sur­pris­es see­ing Lou Reed, John­ny Cash, The Pis­tols, or Zap­pa on here. The Pan­ther Burns was a favorite group of Claude Bessy; The Seeds was a great garage rock band of the ‘60s; Peb­bles is a com­pi­la­tion of Amer­i­can psy­che rock; Alter­na­tive TV, Fear, and Der Plan had vary­ing degrees of suc­cess in the punk and elec­tron­ic gen­res.

Of note, two things: the 16 Great­est Truck Dri­ver Hits cas­sette, which the band must have picked up some­where on tour. A baf­fling release, it has songs not cred­it­ed to any artist, so per­haps this is a stu­dio band con­coc­tion of coun­try cov­ers. But it might have inspired Smith to write his own ver­sion of the Amer­i­can truck­er song, “Con­tain­er Dri­vers”:

Also Philip John­son. Radio City was one of a dozen self-released cas­settes by an ear­ly elec­tron­ic artist, which DieorDIY described as “A fan­tas­tic cut up of var­i­ous cur­rent affairs radio broad­casts, with the clas­sic AM radio sound qual­i­ty, made good by that cosi­ly depress­ing fer­ric oxide degra­da­tion tech­nique.” For those look­ing for the var­i­ous influ­ences on the genius of Mark E. Smith, this entire list gives you a good place to start.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s 40 Favorite Books

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Springsteen’s Favorite Books & Read­ing List

Hayao Miyaza­ki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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